Oh, and I was goofing off for a couple of minutes when I was supposed to be working with the Google AdWords keyword tool, and I found out this disappointing fact that I more or less knew:
Giantess searches
Small man searches
The Approximate Average Search Volume column shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching keywords (either “giantess” or “small man”) that were performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period.
The small-man people clearly need to get it together and perform more searches. I can’t do it all by myself, you dorks.
P.S. I forgot… because of those unthinkable search results, this post needs a fitting soundtrack.
I’m sure I’ll belabor this aspect of collaging again in the future, and when I do you’ll smile, back away slowly, and perkily announce as you run away:
“YEAH! I enjoy eye contact in collages too! I’ll try to find you some [examples] and I’ll BRING ‘EM TO YA!”
Then I’ll throw a house at you for lying to me, but that won’t stop me from constantly repeating that I love it when—in collages— the woman and the man are looking at each other, instead of into the camera. Seriously, when you are with someone you really really like, and that someone happens to be a giantess or a shrunken man, you are not going to look away to smile at the lens of a camera.
That’s just goofy.
But you know who’s not goofy? Real Live Dead, or rld as he’s known to our kind. He enjoys collaging destructive giantesses, but his gentle giantess scenarios are also cosmically well done. Example:
"Tiny Village" by Real Live Dead
When rld shared it with the community at Giantess City, I asked him if he would allow me to modify it a little to show that eye contact I’m talking about. When he said “no” I threw a house at him, and then somehow he changed his mind.*
Months later I uploaded the following image to the Tiny Village image thread. I had pasted a pair of new eyes onto the giantess, therefore frankensteining a lowered gaze directed at the man who’s waving at her, the little guy whom I imagine owns her heart, and who has the terrific job of peeling those grapes.
During my last high school year I wore a skirt like that to school. No observations about its transparent nature shamed me into not wearing it. I wasn’t trying to be a hussy. I simply didn’t care, and I liked the way the skirt looked with certain tops nuns would have found suitable.
And this is the alternate version with eye contact added, as well as a tiny little date.
*Not really. Not only was he nice about my improving changing his lovely work, but he also mentioned wanting to see the end result.
This is something I added to my old blog over a year and a half ago, and since I save plenty of the things I write and today is Sunday so I’m lazy, I’m reusing it.
* * *
I think most of us like sports, whether we play or watch them, or both. Years ago I was watching a game between the Packers and some other team. I was rooting for the Packers, my allegiance won out of friendship with fans and an enjoyment of cheese hats, and not rooted at all on understanding or appreciation of the game. The ball looks deformed, and the players are far too large. If anybody needs a good shrinking, it’s a football player. Anyway, I was watching the game, following it after a fashion, and began to think, What if a giantess was the only player of an opposing team? How much fun would that be to watch?
Those little bodies would scurry and rush and try to pry that abomination of a ball from between her gigantic toes. Good luck with that! And when she’d flick it off, send it like a bullet to singe the air between those two posts, may there be mercy for whoever catches it at the other side. The same goes for fútbol, the sport that raised me as it mingled with my childhood and consciousness as iron does with blood. During the last World Cup I wanted to create an image I could use as an avatar at Giantess.com that would communicate my feelings about it, so I came up with this:
Not perfect. The lighting is all wrong, as he comes from a sunny image, and she doesn’t. His face looks at the camera, when he should be craning his neck, and gazing up. Those were things I wanted to fix at some point, and a few weeks ago I tweaked it a bit and ended up with this.
My kind of fútbol.
Still not perfect, but closer to what I prefer. If a woman in my invented world of dimorphic sexes is halfway smart, she knows how important it is for her health to keep active and exercise her body. If she’s halfway decent, she knows the same holds true for her pets and has little balls and toy mice and trinkets she tosses their way. If she’s lucky the way I am, her pets will toss back. If she’s anything like me, she will combine both pieces of information and know that she should play with her shrunken man as often as possible in order to keep him healthy. Entropy is the enemy.
Fútbol my way is played on rich, green, velvety grass, while wearing high heels (yes, the feminist in me knows that high heels are an oppressive invention of The Man, but I still love them ). A lacy dress is optional, but helpful. I personally skirt the pants, although shorts are nice. Anything to distract him into playing very poorly. Never mind that my size is already extremely advantageous, and that I have all the cards up my sleeve. Yellow and red ones, that is.
He’s very small, but I don’t miss a detail of scissoring legs and straining muscles as he scampers and zig-zags on the field, trying to keep his footing on unfriendly terrain, each step getting lost in shin-high blades of grass as thick as butcher knives. If that was all he had to contend with, the game would be easy… but there’s that gargantuan sphere the size of a mountain boulder, thick rounded leather he wants to kick, remembers how to kick, but is reduced to pushing at his infinitesimal size, until I steal it from him the moment he makes the strategic mistake of trying to lift it, and falls on his back, the ball a heavy weight on his chest.
Foul! Yellow card! I card him for that as I giggle to see those tiny arms and legs flail and whip the air underneath that ball. “Get this thing off me!” he pleads.
So adorable. But not so much that I let him win. We don’t keep that kind of score anyway.
It was a couple of years ago that Giantess.com held a giantess image contest with the theme of creating a winning image that would best depict a “girl next door” as the giantess.
Since plenty of collagers use celebrity images and airbrushed models (in other words, women that aren’t intended to look real), I thought it was a great idea for a contest. I had just received my copy of Photoshop Elements, and I had already begun to accumulate raw material for collages, so I got to working on my entries.
I uploaded the following about thirty days later. That’s how long it took me to complete my first large collages. Now it would be a completely different story, but back then I knew nothing of layers, or contrasts, or extracting pixels, nothing!
There’s much I would do now to improve them, but I’m resisting the impulse to tweak, and getting on with my life. Nowhere_to_sit.jpg won the coveted spinning pink G (all image contest winners got a spinning G next to their avatars that would show up with their every post and at their profiles, and it would spin until the next contest winner was announced), or as we also came to call it, The Preciousss.
I wrote this about a year and a half ago, and these days are very busy for me, so I’ll just repost it. And I know just how they feel.
The limo that had picked her up at the airport stopped in front of the house she had only seen in the picture her uncle had sent her. In person, it looked better than she had hoped. She waited for the driver to open her door, the cage on her lap as she brought one leg out of the vehicle, and then the other. She ignored the driver’s startled stare at the cage’s content, and the impoliteness of his absent hand in assisting her. She figured he was afraid. So many men were, these days.
She didn’t watch him drive away. Instead she stood on a paved path she knew belonged to her although she had not stood on it before today. She knew she would find many boxes inside her new home. The moving truck had already delivered them the week before. Her heart felt a pang as she thought of her country, her family, all the friends, the culture she had left behind. She had abandoned it all for her new job. Almost all. She hadn’t been able to leave him, after all. She felt the weight of the cage dig into her curled palm, and took solace in it.
Her uncle had moved to this land many years ago, but she could still remember sitting on his lap as a child as she listened to the stories he told about his travels as a businessman, but it had been his brother Carlos, her other uncle, the doctor, who had burned in her a need to see the world through scientific eyes. It was because of him she had done what she had done, and because of him she could now carry a man in a cage as easily as others carried cats.
She closed the front door, and breathed the air of her new home. Her uncle had picked it out for her, and she had accepted his gift with gratitude. She could have picked any home, anywhere. She could do anything now, because of her uncle Carlos’s work. No one else would have been able to bring one of them to this country without miles of red tape and weeks of quarantine, but she had only needed to express her reluctance to part from him, and they had even sent her the cage, padded and readied for the small shape that would occupy it. She set it on the floor, and opened its grated door.
“There, little one. This is home now. I know it’s only boxes now, but with a little work we will make it look- hey!”
She watched him bolt from the cage. His legs scissored madly as he ran blindly, his shoulder bumping into a box that read “books 19″, but not enough to stop him. He rounded a cardboard corner, and was gone from her sight.
“Pequeñito, come here!” she called, looking around and into the dark alleys the many boxes shaped.
He’s still afraid, very afraid of me, she thought, chagrined. No amount of tenderness had calmed his terrified resentment, and she had a difficult time blaming him. The virus had started shrinking him only one week ago, and he had been infected intentionally, without his knowledge. She did not think he would ever forgive her, and the sorrow she constantly caught in his eyes had been the main reason she had brought him along.
“Where are you?” She looked in the kitchen, and the main bedroom. Most of the other doors were closed, and at twenty-two inches in height, he was unable to turn the knobs to open them and hide. Finding him was a matter of time. She spotted the main bathroom’s door. It was cracked a few inches.
A-ha! she thought, There’s my Little One.
She slipped her feet off her shoes and took quiet steps she knew he could feel even though the carpet absorbed most of their shock. She pushed the door open slowly, and lo, he stood on the tile floor, shivering with fright, his head low as he covered his eyes with diminute, masculine hands. She sighed and gasped when her feet moved from carpet to tile. It was cold to her, and many times more so to him. He did not run as she kneeled close to him, extending her palm for the first time instead of grabbing him. She pressed the back of her hand against the floor, cold as it was, and waited. She knew he could see it when his hands moved a fraction away from his face.
“Please don’t be afraid of me, Little One. I will never hurt you. I will always keep you with me, and protect you. You will never be alone again. I’m sorry I did this to you, but maybe one day you’ll understand I had little choice.”
She heard him sigh, and when her little feet began to move in her direction, she had to swallow her relief, biting her lip at the tickling sensation of his toes on her fingers. He dropped his knees onto the ball of her palm, and curled his body, his hands only leaving his face to slide toward the back of his head. She lifted him slowly, bringing herself up on her feet as well. Her eyes never left him as she began to kiss his back. Once, and again, until his arms extended for an embracing hold.
She stood there for a while, feeling his small bottom sink into her forearm, and his arms stretch around her neck. He was breathing into the hollow of her collarbone, and finally spoke. His words were a shock to her, as he had done nothing but scream and cry after being shrunk.
“I can forgive you for shrinking me. I can forgive you for taking me away from everything and everyone I love. I can let go of your snatching my life away and giving me one of your own shaping. I can forget all that belonged to me. My books, my work, my money, everything. One day, I may even understand why you did what you did to me.
What I will never forgive … is this barbaric room.”
He fell silent then. Puzzled, she thought of asking him what he meant, but looked around the room instead. The bathroom was beautiful. Bronze fixtures gleamed from the vintage claw tub. A diaphanous shower curtain gathered around its side. The tile, cold as it was, was a rich off-white with maroon embossing. The sink’s fixtures matched the tub’s. She looked at the toilet, her eyes widening. She clutched his body to hers as she whirled in place, looking for something that should have been there, something that was not there, her horrified understanding growing. He clutched back, acknowledging her realization with the slightest pinching of his little fingers.
There was no bidet.
* * *
There is a group of people that moves to the United States with an important piece of data missing from their body of knowledge: bathrooms in the U.S. are not regularly fitted with bidets. Sure, we get used to that primeval lack in hotels when we visit the country, but when we move here, we realize with great horror that homes don’t have them either.
The idea of toilet paper seems, in comparison, as hygienically deficient as brushing our teeth with a fingertip. I find it risible that the Wikipedia article about toilet paper explains that people use water to clean themselves in countries where toilet paper is not an affordable solution. They have it backwards. In those places it is preferable to be assuredly clean, than to remain in doubt which is later removed by underwear streaks.
During this episode I began to realize that every member of the team that comes in to “replace” Zach gets the boot when the episode is done. In this case I was glad of it, because that lady was annoying in a prefab, clearly intended way, and a caricature overly intended to amuse me. I despise every occasion a TV show goes out of its way to hold my hand and lead me into diversion.
“Here’s a poster for comic relief proven to have worked under different circumstances” doesn’t work nearly as well as nuanced humor. But hey, this was a great episode, because it included a great deal of poop. Forget everything I said before. Give me poop, and I’ll be laughing for twenty-four hours straight, specially it that poop drizzles, rains, or covers anyone.
The most I’ve ever laughed while watching a movie has been When Poop Attacks!
Aah… still funny.
Back to Bones. I thought this episode was interesting because it exposed Brennan’s double-stacked dating practices as she saw two different men (separately but at the same time), a deep-sea welder and a botanist, which in her place I would find time consuming and confusing, sort of the way I felt when I collaged this:
Heart-shaped Triangle
I like things monogamous, so I still don’t know what to make of this collage, even after all these months. Maybe I put it together because it disturbs me, not only what it shows, but also what it implies. No, I don’t like it. But I like it. What’s up with that? I remember finding the background and thinking it was a beautiful image, a nice place where I could put a tiny man, in the embrace of a woman, a wall he could only try to hug back.
Much later I found the male element of the movie, times two. My mouse somehow moved on its own to save it, even as I stared at it and thought, There’s no way I’ll ever find any use for this image, because I like collaging monogamous situations. One man, one woman, just the way I like my real life.
The day came I started cleaning out my Mac and tossing away some images as I paired up elements to collage later; background with foregrounds came together beautifully, surprisingly most of the time because the way I accumulated images was random, and I often didn’t remember or know I had already found the rest of an image.
I came upon those two little guys and the woman, and like sentient shoelaces that tie themselves, they wrapped around each other in my mind, and I tossed them into a folder I called “Heart-shaped”, since the woman’s torso is shaped like a heart by her arm and leg, and the two guys are shaped like a heart as well, though inverted. I forgot all about it as I moved on to work on different images that showed what I really like.
But eventually I found it again, and used the background for another image… I kept staring at those guys, and they finally stared back. Finally, the collage started collaging me.
Does that ever happen to you? You write something and you have no idea where it’s coming from, because you would never ever want it to happen. It’s the stuff of bad dreams, the sort of lunch they serve in Purgatory Cafeteria, the Early Bird Special in Limbo, but you write it because it’s writing itself through you. This collage was like that, so there I was, lassoing, selecting, cutting, dragging, cloning, shadowing, until it was done, and as I worked, the collage worked on me too; I don’t like it, but it likes me, and I like the story it tells.
And all that had nothing to do with Bones… except in a different TV dimension, Brennan keeps her two little men in the same dollhouse, and Mark can hold his breath down there for six minutes, instead of three.
Booth’s interference when he met Mark or interrupted Jason was arrogant, blah blah blah; but what I kept thinking about was, where in the world did Carmen San Diego meet a deep-sea welder? Given past seasons’ events, I’m gonna guess Brennan found him online.
Speaking of which, enough time wasted online for me. See ya!
Like the smallest vine reaching for the tallest tree.
I created this collage using several different images, and the background is a remix of a photograph titled Legs by kitta, both image and author found at Flickr. I was taken with it when I saw the skirt and how it was made with a really great fabric pattern.
At first I had no idea in which way I’d ever get to use it, but when I spotted the right little guy I knew what I was going to do. As it turned out, I ended up using parts from three different images to frankenstein together the shrunken man. It was both hell and fun, but not as much eternal damnation as the shadows were.
As to what inspired the collage, it is far too dirty for me to share here, so I’ll just say they are talking. Yeah, just talking.
Date with a giantess. Kinda hard to make it a blind one.
In my eternal quest to collage from a different perspective from the ones I’ve seen year after year, I found an image of Hugh Jackman smiling at the camera, with a great panorama beyond that screamed “insert giantess here”. Not long after that (but millennia in Photoshop years) I fetched the rest of what I needed for the image.
If I had it exactly the way I wanted, the man would focus his attention on the woman, but then his head would be turned away from the camera, and show me an actor that goes for that sort of publicity shot. Still, the goofy smile tells the viewer he’s feeling quite happy his date measures a gazillion inches in height. She isn’t complaining about his smallness either.
The first piece of crap short story I wrote was about a blind date between two people that had initially found each other on the Internet. After chatting for a few months, they decided to meet in person, except she never revealed to him she was 203′5″ tall. In tribute to my enjoyment of the ridiculous, she arrived quite nonchalantly at the restaurant where they had agreed to meet, while around them people screamed and traffic jammed as her huge feet bumped nonpartisanly into buses and bodies, and her legs shaved off power lines and street lights.
Accidentally, of course. She was on the clumsy side.
While flummoxed and (secretly) apprehensive at first, the male character finds nothing wanting about the colossal lady, and aside from the horrifying bill he receives after she eats everything on the menu, all goes without a hitch. He never brings up her tremendous height, as he feels it would be akin to calling her “fat”. After their meal they go for a walk / run, ignoring the chaos around them, and finally they do what characters usually do in giantess stories.
But later I deleted that part.
Or maybe I’m just saying I did.
Because, who’d want to read about a giantess and a man getting biblical with each other? Bah! I can count those people with 19,000 fingers.
Bones debuted its fourth season a couple of weeks ago. As I don’t have cable service I forgot all about it until Amazon.com sent me an email about the fir$t epi$ode’$ download availability. The very idea…! Being who I am, I looked for the free online video. I’m perfectly willing to pay for the whole season when it’s released, but until then I’m not gonna clog my Mac with TV series, when I need the space for really important things, such as shrunken men collages.
So I sat down one night and began to watch the entire thing, from beginning to end. My first thought was, “Sooo… Zach was really a bad guy then? It wasn’t some sort of trick, or joke, or test of faith, like the dinosaur fossils?” See, I kept waiting for the punchline on that one. Yes, I know it’s just a TV show, and I hate TV and all that, but… this is Zach I’m talking about.
Not only was his character smart and well spoken (English not being my native language, I practiced word pronunciations after his speech patterns), but from day one he was part of the glue that kept the fictitious Jeffersonian team cohesive, that moved in perfect unison with the rest of each episode in dialogue, in behavior, in comic release… He was King of the Lab!
Just as Zach could identify patterns with a single glance, he fit into the Bones group causing no double take, no itchy annoyance in the back of my mind. The entire season debut was a huge rash covering 80% of my brain. I had to look up the show to make sure the writers were still the same. It isn’t a new thing that sometimes successful TV shows start up a new season with weak episodes. Numb3rs comes to mind, after that Sliders woman moved on. I can’t watch it anymore, as it’s now populated by clichés surrounding the main characters.
I’m not saying the entire thing was terrible… but the forensic workload was predictable, and not prominent enough. I love it when Hodgins enumerates particulate after particulate, and all I can remember is some crushed coral that Bones recognized herself. The whole puzzling after microscopic bits of evidence was missing, or maybe I didn’t get the chemistry that’s always been there between Zach and Hodgins. Oh, I’ll be bellyaching about for at least three more days.
Bones aerial
There were some good moments, two of those I’ve screen-captured here, for the happy memories. I love aerial shots in photography and film because they are a wonderful window to how things would look to me were I seriously tall. A few minutes into the season there was such a shot. See the tiny little red car in the center of the picture? That’s Booth’s rental, and standing next to it you’ll see the man himself, screaming in the middle of the street because he’s frustrated with London traffic.
Whatever. I wasn’t paying any attention to that. Instead, in my head I was making calculations as to my fictional height when standing on the camera’s spot. I put me at +100 ft. in height, the average person down there about three inches in length. Fabulous. There would be enough space between buildings for me to walk along streets, and I’d be tall enough to look over plenty of buildings. Or walk over them. Why cross the street when I can cross the building?
That was a nice moment for my imagination. Another one didn’t have anything to do with being a giantess, but with my love for guns. Seeley Booth carried no weapon in England, but once he became part of a murder investigation, he requested a weapon. The inspector that provided him with one handed him this beautiful box with an even more beautiful firearm in it, a Walther PPK.
A fabulous Walther PPK
That’s a James Bond weapon, not that it matters because James Bond is a big fat fictional jerk. The Walther PP was originally manufactured in Germany (Polizeipistol—allegedly what Hitler shot himself with), and it has a few variants. The PPK is one of them, and one I certainly lust for. Slim, light, with a couple of possible calibers as ammo, it’s one of the best choices for concealed carrying, and if I owned one I’d probably sleep with it too. Another model, produced in association with S&W, the PPS, only measures 1.04″ in width. I could sleep with that one too, and not even feel it until I have to blow the brains of a home intruder. I’ve read it’s a fun competition firearm as well.
But for that I’d have to “settle” for the PPK, as the magazines are cheaper, and my money doesn’t grow on trees. The PPK will probably be the first contemporary weapon I purchase… before that I might shop around for an antiquity. Less money, loads of history.
Back to Bones: the lackluster opening episode doesn’t mean I’ll stop watching it. Right now it’s still my favorite show.
Making pancakes for dinner, and later catching Dexter's latest episode. LN I dreamt I was a serial killer that only killed serial killers. 22 hours ago
Dear Santa, I would like to find some time to blog under my tree this Christmas. Awesome dreams, cool ads, nice thoughts, all awaiting. 4 days ago
I always thought Adrien Brody was creepy, but now that I've read the fuckface is a Polanski supporter, I'm steering clear[er] of his flicks. 2 weeks ago
Dear NBC, howya doin'? Rotting in hell going well for ya? Also, Rot in hell again for releasing "Life" sans original soundtrack. xxxoooxxx 2 weeks ago
I just bought my first mp3 online! Wow! I've finally joined the 90s. (And it's a Rap song, by the way. ) 2 weeks ago
). A lacy dress is optional, but helpful. I personally skirt the pants, although shorts are nice. Anything to distract him into playing very poorly. Never mind that my size is already extremely advantageous, and that I have all the cards up my sleeve. Yellow and red ones, that is.
